sassmistress 's review for:

Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson

4.5

adventurous mysterious tense slow-paced

Plot or Character Driven: Plot

Strong character development: No

Loveable characters: Yes

Diverse cast of characters: No

Flaws of characters a main focus: No

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A thrilling, classic adventure about 18th century seafaring and pirates and treasure hunting. More info in content section. 

With older language, high vocabulary, antiquated turns of phrase, and some hard-to-interpret "dialect writing", I would say a high school reader could handle it alone, but as a read aloud you could go much younger. My brother loved it in early elementary school.

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Death, Racial slurs, Racism, Alcohol, Injury/Injury detail

Moderate: Gun violence, Violence, Murder

Minor: Animal death, Drug use, Panic attacks/disorders, Blood, Death of parent, Colonisation

The book being "from a different time", the casual racism is pretty bad. There's a paragraph near the end of the book about meeting people of color in Spanish America and 2-3 references to an unmet woman as the feminized n-word (e-one-g), "n***ess". No sexual content aside from the very distant implication of an unmarried pirate having a female companion at another port (she is referred to with a racial slur). No cursing beyond old-timey pirate talk ("shiver my timbers" type stuff). The narrator dances around implied cursing by saying things like "with an oath I shall not write here". There are many references to prayer, eternity, one's Maker, etc, all positive. The main character admonishes a pirate to pray for God's mercy. Superstitions about ghosts and defacing a Bible causing bringing a curse on you make an appearance. One pirate repeatedly uses "Christian" in an older English sense, to really mean "civilized" (i.e. "European"), and this isn't commented on. The "good guys" do their duty (spelled "dooty" in the book) and keep their word even when they'd really rather not. Pirates are treacherous and deceptive. There is a lot of drunkenness, portrayed negatively, though the "good guys" also use some alcohol and tobacco themselves. The biggest concern some will have is the violence. Murder is kept at a little more distance, but there are accidental/self-defense deaths and intentional injury up close. Dead bodies are described at length. Peril feels very real. Hanging is mentioned frequently, being the legal penalty for piracy.

The "good guys" do maroon some pleading pirates, because bringing them home to the death penalty seemed cruel. They fire upon pirates in self defense and hold them at gunpoint preemptively.